|
Opening Extensions to the Sydney Jewish Museum
Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst
14 June 2009
Ladies and Gentlemen
Thank you for your warm welcome.
I want you to know how delighted I am to join you here today for this significant moment in the life of the Sydney Jewish Museum: one of Sydney’s most cherished and valuable cultural institutions; your building, Maccabean Hall, a centre of Jewish experience in this beautiful city since 1923.
Today you commence a fresh chapter, and celebrate new layers of purpose and opportunity in the refurbished ground floor and the visual archive.
These things add to an already impressive place: intriguing in its design; confronting in its collection; articulate in its message; careful in its keeping of the past.
The images and objects you house here, though stilled and softened by time, are profound in their impact.
Each one delivers a story, a past, a warning. Each one holds a sacred memory, never to be forgotten.
Simon Wiesenthal reminded us of the obligation of those who survive to those who did not.1
To learn from them and listen to their voices. To never allow our present to close over theirs.
This is the heart of your Museum: what you have been doing well for seventeen years, and what your new additions allow you further to explore and unfold.
They add dimensions – historical, cultural, local, personal – to your spiralling narrative. They bring colour and particularity to the journey of a people across many lands and thousands of years.
They give us a uniquely Australian perspective on the strengths, the sufferings, the offerings and the dreams of Jewish people who’ve journeyed to and from these shores.
From Jewish convicts on the First Fleet, to the rich and enduring contributions that Jewish people have made to Australian society: in arts and letters, in law and governance, in trade and business.
One example that must come to my mind is my predecessor Sir Isaac Isaacs: an extraordinarily gifted lawyer and judge who became in 1931 the first Australian-born Governor-General.
His biographer, Sir Zelman Cowan, was Governor-General from 1977 - 1982, following a distinguished academic legal career. He is a person for whom I have much admiration, respect and affection.
Many others are recollected and featured here.
I am fascinated by the exhibition of Judy Cassab’s paintings – one of my favourite artists and writers, and a treasure of Australia’s cultural life in the twentieth century.
The only woman to win the Archibald twice, Cassab was a highly acclaimed portrait painter. In the 1950s she was invited to Yarralumla to paint the Governor-General’s wife, Lady Slim.
The two became friends, and began a contemporary Australian collection at Government House.
Cassab also wrote evocatively of her own life – her Hungarian childhood, her passion for art, her deep attachment to her family, her journey in the aftermath of the Holocaust to begin afresh in Australia.
Her wartime diaries are deeply moving.
Looking through the pages again, I reflected on this entry:
16 August 1945. My second birthday without Anyu, my dear mother. I am thinking of her with longing and grief […]
We lost a whole world. The poor souls who survived go back to their empty houses. They wander between borders. The saddest wandering history ever produced.
That lost world, and the wandering that ensued, are part of what is remembered here.
In the new Visual Archive, with its thousands of voices, faces, words; in the new exhibition of Judaism in historical context, we see loss and retrieval; the light and shadow of Jewish experience; the darkest passages and the dawn of freedom, the building of new lives.
These things are inscribed deeply, preserved thoughtfully and shared generously in the Sydney Jewish Museum.
It is my great pleasure now officially to open a new phase in the life of your place and your community.
May it be a home for wanderers, and a haven for their stories.
1. Simon Wiesenthal The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, 1976.
|